How do I get started with staging?

You’ll find the switch to enable Staging under the Advanced tab of the site’s Flywheel dashboard. Toggle that switch on to get Staging set up for your site!

It may take a few minutes to get Staging ready, particularly if you have a large site, but once setup is complete, you’ll have a new Staging tab in your site’s Flywheel dashboard. Click that new tab to see all the info and options related to your new staging site.

You can access your staging site at the URL listed in the Staging tab. (Simply prepending “staging.” to the live URL won’t work if you have a domain pointed to the site; it needs to be the site’s .flywheelsites.com domain.) You’ll still log in to WordPress exactly the same way, using the same credentials as on the live site.

When you connect via SFTP, you’ll see a new folder with the same name as your original site, only appended with “_staging”. This is where you can access and edit your staging site’s files directly through SFTP.

Because you don’t want search bots crawling your staging site or visitors seeing it while you’re still working on it, the staging site is protected by a Privacy Mode. The username and password can be found in the Staging tab, and they’ll be identical to the Privacy Mode username and password on the live site.

Now you’re up and running! Feel free to change and experiment with anything you want to in Staging. Nothing you do in Staging will affect the live site until and unless you press the “Move staging changes to live site” button in the Staging tab of the site’s Flywheel dashboard.

If you’d like to learn a little more about the best way to use staging, check out this article. And if you’re curious about how to push your changes when you’re ready, we’ve got an article for that, too.

Enjoy!